


Spades of Grays

by ForevermoreNevermore



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arkham Asylum, F/M, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 17:15:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/968471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForevermoreNevermore/pseuds/ForevermoreNevermore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Knock knock?</p><p>Who's there?</p><p>The two guys who walked into the bar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spades of Grays

**Author's Note:**

> So, uh, yeah... very loose Harley Quinn, totally not canon I just kind of wanted to see what would happen if she was in a Nolan movie. Plus, she's one of my favorite beings on the planet. Thank you for reading!

The folder was nudged across the table  with a slimy jubilation that Harleen had come to associate with the brand of creep that was distilled in Arkham Asylum.

"Have fun." 

Two lights lit a cinder block lined room, divided down the center with plexiglass thick enough to stop a tank. But not words, and the psychiatrist really wondered sometimes why one was deemed less violent than the other. It was words that can do a person in. Two chairs sat in a standoff. 

The first day, she just sits and stares. Watching for some giveaway. Vaguely she noticed that he was doing the same thing. His tongue is a roiling cobra. 

"I'm your psychiatrist for your stay here."

"Are you going to put chocolates on my pillow like a pretty little maid?"

"My name is Harleen Quinzel."

"Harleen huh? D'ya mind if I call you Harley?" he makes a low rumble in his throat like a motorcycle roaring to life that soon dissolves into chortles. 

No one's ever tried to give her a nickname before.

"Harleen." 

The pills she takes that night can't quite stop the nightmares. Delusions, hallucinations, side affects. She can't bring herself to mind too much. They keep her on the right side of the plexiglass and that's all that matters. 

"Why did you do it?"

The man had been thumping out a nameless tune against the barrier from his spot leaning against it. 

His answer is in the tune of a petulant child. "I got bored. Needed new toys."

"These toys had feelings and lives. You do understand that right?"

He spreads his arms and falls onto his back in a roll. "People are always just trying to find the la-test and great-est in innovation. I just beat them to punch. New, realistic scream feature!" He pitches his voice up high and bats his eyelashes. "Moooommmyyy! Daaaadddyyyyy!" His hands delicately touch the glass, fingertips resting. "Haaaarrrlleeeeyyyy!"

Her pin taps against the clipboard. "Harleen." 

"So pushy..." the tongue reappears. "I kinda like it." Harleen took a moment to blink at him. 

That night the pills didn't work either.

She pushes around a wilted salad in its own vinaigrette, staring blindly at the man, Dr. Finn, who sits across from her. The lighting is as tacky as the dull yellow of the table.  

The food is tasteless and after a while congeals into a form she can hardly swallow.

"Uh," Dr. Finn pats a finger under his eyes. "You might need a bit of concealer. Just because you're middle aged doesn't make you out for the count. Maybe if you tried..." And he winks and shifts away from the table. 

Twenty five is not middle aged. Twenty five is hardly an adult. Hell, she's just learned the difference between a dick and doctor at that very table. 

She begins to wonder if she's been investing her makeup money in the wrong brand. 

"You don't seem to be getting enough sleep," the mock concern leaks through scarred lips. "Having... interesting dreams?"

Her hand rests agaisnt a fist against her knee against a chair against an unmovable object. There had been no energy to put her hair up in a bun this morning. Her makeup is haphazard at best and her suit is slightly butchered in its formation.  

Her tongue slips. It's three weeks in, no one could blame her. "You would be interesting in a blind dating game. You've always got just the answer for everything, dont'cha?"

The chair has been turned around and he leans over the back. 

"Hmm, what is the delicious accent I'm tasting on you?" Delicious?

"How'd you get those scars, hun?" Harleen gives a hard sigh, puffing it up at the wayward     bangs hanging across her face. Her finger slips by her mouth and smears her red lipstick. It's odd how that man's eyes follow the movement so intently. The destruction of perfection, red making a smile where there is none.

The Joker stills, tongue mid-swipe. His fingers curl around the cheap frame of the chair and for a moment Harleen wonders if she's actually stopped him up. No smart ass punch line.

"You want to know how I got... these scars?" There's a theatricality in the way that he            gestures towards his own mouth. "I had a kid, once. Wife left me to fend and flounder with the little tyke. Horrible thing was, the little snot looked just... like her. All big blinking blue eyes and pretty little brown curls and, 'why are you so sad when you look at me, daddy?' He was just so crushed that his own papa couldn't even look at him. So I fixed it." His lips pull apart with a smack and Harleen hasn't even noticed he's gotten closer to the glass. "The little Swiss Army Knife that I had passed down, I got back. It made quick work, as you can see." He preens, just a bit. "But he didn't return the sentiment. So I did what any good father would do... I put a smile on that face."

"Where's your son now?" Oddly, she finds herself wanting to meet him.

"Oh, I imagine he's out in the green backyard, making an awful lump under the daisies." 

Harleen gets this joke.

That night the nightmares take on a different shade.

"And, when I was twelve, I decided I liked curves on my women..." He was drawling out a lifestory as a granny knits a scarf. 

"You've got to be the most giving patient in this hell hole."

His voice is made of sin and charcoal. "And you have got to be the most beautiful bottle         blonde I have ever laid eyes on." Harleen raised a bit from her chair. The Joker (Mr. J as she has shortened it to for convenience) narrows his eyes and smiles at his secret. "Roots."

A hand flies to the top of her head, another reaching for a ponytail.

"Oh noooo," he is exaggerated as he trudges back to his chair. "Not the ponytail again. So... blegh, so business-like. Keep it free, man. Loose." He runs a hand over his head and smiles into his scars. "Besides, you look... like a dainty little daisy."

Her hand immediately drops from her head. "You flatter me, Mr. J." 

He laughs at some private joke then. "Do I?" Always at some private joke. Harleen wanted to be let in, no one loves a good joke more than Harley. 

That night she welcomes the dreams.

Harley eats pie for lunch the next day, key lime pie leftover from some holiday or other. She only vaguely recognizes the other nurse in the room.

"Well, someone's fearless." She says, eyeing the pie.

"Nope, just hopeful."

She's heard his life story five times over, nothing came of it the first time and nothing will come from another telling.

They play hangman on the back of his form.

"Umm... a q?" 

"Yes." His smile has a reptilian vibe to it, and Harley holds the paper against the glass for him to show where the letters go.  

He points out only one. There is one a, one i, and a q and Harley finds herself frowning up at the little half man hanging from a noose.  

Out of the corner of her eye she sees a camera. It's on, recording their sessions on a film no one will watch in a room no one will enter. It's really a bad pun; something like is a movie a movie if no one watches it, or- her mind would try to grasp at the nebulous ends, but they would always just become boring again. Everything was boring in comparison to Mr. J.

She guessed an e (very good, there's one). She guesses a K, a B and a M before her little man is hung. She draws a smiley face across it's oblong head. Harley is rather proud of it.

"What was the word, Mr. J?"

"It is an angel," his hands make vague fluttering gestures in front of his face. 

"Angel doesn't fit."

"No, I KNOW angel doesn't fit, that's not the word, you..." he trails off as his voice sinks down into an octave she has never heard before. He's smiling again, but it's not quite right. "Sweet... thing..." he seems to be chewing over his words. At the thought Harley lets loose a little giggle. "It was a clue. Here... there's an, H, there," he shows her how to fill in the blanks and she dutifully does what he says, glancing up into his eyes at the completion of the word.

"What do you think, Harleen?"

"Harley." His smile is there again and Harley wishes she could've seen him at his prime. War paint on and vitrol. 

Well, he's not dead. Encores are never out of the question.

That night, three months after she started seeing Mister J, Harleen Quinzal stops taking her pills. 

The room is the same as it's always been, but on that day Harley saw stars. And diamonds. And a future she'd never considered pathed out in little stepping stones in hearts and clubs. Out of pity, they'd allowed her to give a deck of cards to the insane man she spoke to. The sound of them bridging across his nimble fingers crossed the gap between them. It was delicious in it's thickness, card stock on card on stock on flesh. Over and under and grab the loop and pull it through. 

"Wouldya do it again?"

"In a heartbeat." She frowns and hopes he doesn't mean he'd do everything. Getting caught, again might not allow for the same leniancy. 

His body is pressed against the plexiglass seperating them, orange jumpsuit flush against flesh Harley hadn't realized she'd wanted to see until just... that... moment. 

The Joker growls in that laugh of his and Harley approaches the glass. 

Gotta love a man with fire in his lungs.

She brings a finger up and traces those scars through that damn wall, they're old and tell a story she's heard five variations of. So clean, so violent.

She doesn't feel the frown pulling at her lips until she sees the man notice it. From this close, bodies flung wonton against a barrier, his eyes are alight and beautiful. They're fire and hatred and it curls at Harley's toes.

"What could you have to frown about?" And his laugh wracks through his body so violently he thumps against the wall, cackle turning into a crow into a call that slid through Harley's bones like a hair-thin knife. 

"Because you're over there, puddin'. And I can't touch you." She presses a kiss to the glass and sees him smile (or the scars) at her.

"Then how about we blow this Popsicle stand and go somewhere a little bit more... private, comfier."

And so Harley Quinn makes a plan. She sits and she plots and she doodles a little stick figure Mister J in the corner of the plans and goes back for more. It's brilliant, it's flawless, and it bought just enough time for the real flawless plan to arrive. 

Harley had heard the name murmered from her boss. Bane. Bane this, Bane that, Bane is so big he probably won't fit in a cell. She ignored it.

Then it became, Bane did this, Bane killed them, Bane snapped Batman's back like a twig.

Finally, it was Bane is coming, Bane left without us, Bane has a tank. Surprise mother fuckers. 

It blows the wall sky high and Harley watches as her Joker sneaks away without a second glance.

"You can't leave without your Harley!" She calls from where the plexiglass wall fell on her. He turned on his heel and stared down at her, apathetic but still... a part of him was smiling at her, always and forever smiling just for her.

The blood she coughs onto her white shirt leaves a brilliant four of hearts.

Joker places his deck of cards on the plexiglass by her head. 

"Call me."

_______

The good samaritan that pulls her from the rubble brushes aside bangs to check a blossoming egg on the front of her noggin. He asks if she's okay.

"Who? Little ol' me? I'm fine, in fact, it was a blast." She ignores his warnings of going to the doctor. She tells him that she is a doctor and she's never been better so do kindly piss off. 

Harley Quinn is a new woman, dammit, and new women hate being dumped.


End file.
